John Cusack started out playing sensitive, angsty roles in romantic comedies like Sixteen Candles, The Sure Thing, and Say Anything…; even in quirkier early films like Better Off Dead, Tapeheads, and One Crazy Summer, he tended to be the sympathetic, vulnerable, put-upon type. He's done romantic comedies since then, but since the '90s, Cusack has looked for darker, more complicated, and particularly odder roles in the likes of The Grifters, True Colors, and Being John Malkovich. In 1997, he co-wrote and co-produced Grosse Pointe Blank, a box-office hit and lingering cult favorite in which he plays an assassin who winds up attending his 10th-anniversary high-school reunion. Since then, he's alternated unremarkable genre outings (Must Love Dogs, Runaway Jury, Identity) with odder fare, which he often helps produce: High Fidelity, Max, and the new Grace Is Gone, in which he plays an ultraconservative dad panicking over the question of how to tell his children that their soldier mom has died in action in Iraq. After a Chicago critics' screening of Grace Is Gone, The A.V. Club sat down with Cusack to discuss his move into producing, his 10 "good" films, and the prospect of getting too old for rom-com roles.
The A.V. Club: Do you think of Grace Is Gone more as a political film, or as a personal one?
John Cusack: I don't know if there's a difference. I guess I'd have to define political. I think in the time we made it, the Bush administration decided they wanted to ban the photos of the dead coming home. So to do a story about grief for 90 minutes is actually, in a strange way, a political statement. It may not be partisan, but even just the acknowledgment of the grief—these guys wanted to just throw it under the rug. In the meantime, they were sort of privatizing the war and bringing in mercenaries, and not funding the troops.
AVC: So in a way, making it was a political act.
JC: But I don't think it's a political film. But I think everything has some politics to it. It's just whether or not it admits to it. Politics is weird. I don't even know what that means any more.
AVC: But that's just it—it's become very difficult in this country to discuss politics rationally. Did that come up when you were planning or making the film? Were there conflicts about how to address the issues you raise?
JC: I think one of the things that was nice about the story was that it pierced through the script. Everything gets reduced to the common rubble of partisan bickering, like "I'm the left, you're the right. You're conservative, I'm liberal. It's your fault." Everybody just yells at each other, but this one just seemed to cut through all that stuff, and be a meditation on grief. I don't know if we succeeded, but that was our plan. We wanted to get beyond all that, to just go, "Look, man." There were just so many people that died in the war. So many families that are affected. I thought, "We'll just tell a story of one of the coffins coming home." It was a pretty nice script, I thought. And I thought just the idea—the arguments are coming from a true believer who's lost somebody, and from a 12-year-old girl. I thought, "Well, if anybody's earned the right to ask these questions, they have." At that time, people were still supporting this fiasco.
AVC: People still are. Is there a timeliness issue? Were you concerned about getting the film out while the issues are still fresh?
JC: Yeah, I think so. We wanted to get it out as fast as possible, as kind of a real-time response to it all.
AVC: You've been vocal about the war yourself, but you're playing a character who comes across as politically conservative—
JC: Very conservative.
AVC: Was there a plan to present pro-war and anti-war viewpoints so it would be accessible to both sides?
JC: Yeah. I wrote this big thing where I interviewed [author] Naomi Klein on The Huffington Post. Yeah, I'm very vocal about it. That doesn't mean I can't be compassionate for people who disagree with me, or coming from a different point of view. So I wanted to get inside that guy's head without any condescension.
AVC: Do you think of Grace Is Gone as specifically a film about Iraq, or could this be about war and grief in general, applicable to other times and places?
JC: I can't imagine it not being Iraq, but I can't imagine there being too many modern wars that are just causes any more. I suppose there could be. It just doesn't feel that way. With another war, the sense of betrayal would be different.
AVC: As a producer, how closely were you involved in determining the tone or content of the film?
JC: It was a pretty small group: the writer-director, me, and then the kids and the director of photography, and those are really all the people who are doing it. As a producer, you make sure you get the right kind of keys to come in and support the movie, and then you know how long it'll take to shoot something. And you know the atmosphere and what you need to do well so you can create that atmosphere.
AVC: How do you go about creating the atmosphere you want?
JC: I've just been doing it for a long time, so I know about it a little bit. So you create a nice bubble for the director and the actors and for people to think—to keep too many cooks out of the kitchen. You'd have to be on the set to understand. I mean, I can try to explain it you.
AVC: Please.
JC: You want to create an atmosphere where actors can concentrate, where they can get some momentum where they work. That they're not second-guessed. That they feel like they can make mistakes. That their own individuality is the most important thing. Their opinions matter. All the stuff—all the trucks, all the lights, the cameras, everything that's there, all this hubbub and all these people walking around, all of it so you can capture a human moment on a screen—that's what everyone's here for. Get the fuck out of the way. Be quiet. But I don't say that in front of them. You try to create a little bit of a sacred space.
AVC: How did that compare to your role in producing High Fidelity?
JC: Same thing.
AVC: It doesn't depend on the other people you're working with, or the size of the project?
JC: Nope. High Fidelity was just a bigger gig. It was more complicated.
AVC: Was it different coming into Grosse Pointe Blank as a first-time producer? Did you go in knowing how you wanted to handle that role?
JC: Well, it's all like managing a tidal wave. It's all kind of a clusterfuck. But I know enough around the set where I know, "Well, this is what it'll take to get this done," and "This is not realistic," and "Do we have enough for this?" And usually I've either written the script or, if I'm producing, I know it. I've been around. I've done it for a while. I'm not a numbers-cruncher, but I have an intuitive sense of "No, you don't have enough time for this, so that's gonna mean more money."
AVC: Has your role changed at all as you've produced several films and gotten more experienced?
JC: Yeah. I mean, it comes to the same thing, which is getting all these cameras around to create moments onscreen. All the rest of it is distraction that you have to get out of the way.
AVC: What about your role as an actor? As you've gotten more involved in the technical aspects of filmmaking, have you wanted more involvement in shaping films you aren't writing or producing?
JC: Yeah, but I won't do that as an actor as much, except for if it affects my role. I'll offer my opinion, but it's other people's jobs. As a producer, you say, "Hey, this is really my production, and I'm responsible for it." You have other partners, but it's your party. So it's nice that way. But mostly it all comes to the same stuff, which is… I'm much more about the script and the actors and trying to find stuff. So that doesn't change when you work on the script. You work on the script with the director and the other actors, and you try to figure out a way to either make the genre better, or do something original and not embarrass yourself.
AVC: Have you traditionally been the kind of actor who suggests line changes, or points out things that don't work?
JC: Yeah, those are called pain in the asses. [Laughs.]
AVC: Are you a pain in the ass?
JC: I don't know. It depends on your point of view.
AVC: From your point of view—
JC: No, I'm not. But I'm demanding on material as much as I can be. Some things are what they are. They're never going to be anything more than they are. You try to make it as good as you can, but with an action movie or whatever it is, you're doing it so you can get leverage to go do Grace Is Gone or whatever these other ones are. So there's a ceiling on how good you can make something. But you try, right? You try your best. Then with other things, you can do very, very experimental stuff, and then you can really dig into it.
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